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Anti-Imperialism - Fighting for america's soul

Such measures attracted opposition. Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's
vice president from 1941 to 1945 and presidential candidate in 1948,
challenged the emerging "cold war" against the Soviet
Union, charging that the United States was using "a predominance
of force to intimidate the rest of mankind." Atomic scientists
such as Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard eloquently warned of the perils
of a nuclear arms race and established organizations and journals to
challenge the political status quo. Journalists like Walter Lippmann and
the radical I. F. Stone expressed their concern over the extensions of
American power and responsibility into all parts of the world. Senators
as diverse as the liberal Claude Pepper and "Mr.
Conservative" Robert Taft feared the establishment of a military
government. Vito Marcantonio, a Labor Party member of the House of
Representatives, attacked business and military influences in Washington
and the expansion of American capitalism into the developing world. Many
liberals feared that the United States was abandoning its republican
virtues, especially as the political repression associated with Senator
Joseph McCarthy consumed the nation's political affairs in the
1950s.

African-American critics in particular challenged the intensified
imperialism, as they saw it. Black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul
Robeson, and Harry Haywood believed it was dangerous, not to mention
hypocritical, for the United States to spread its values and
institutions abroad while maintaining a system of apartheid in its
southern states. In particular, black spokespersons began to point out
the common struggles of Africans trying to gain their national
independence from colonial powers and of blacks in the United States
seeking civil rights. Americans could hardly lead the "free
world" by example, they argued, while maintaining legal
segregation at home and endorsing continued colonization in Africa and
other parts of the Third World. Although many mainstream black leaders
supported the Cold War, hoping to parlay their loyalty to foreign
policies into a commitment to act against racism at home, Du Bois,
Robeson and others offered a more critical analysis, even invoking a
Leninist critique of capitalist expansion and looking to the Soviet
Union as an anti-imperialist model and champion of the rights of
nonwhite peoples. Paul Robeson condemned Winston Churchill's
"Iron Curtain" speech as a scheme for "Anglo-Saxon
domination" of the world, and called for "united action of
all democratic forces to achieve freedom for all colonial and subject
peoples."

Views such as Robeson's, however, were not conventional wisdom,
even in the black community, and most Americans accepted the new global
role ushered in by the Cold War. Throughout the 1950s, then, the United
States, without much dissent, intervened in a civil war in Korea,
overthrew governments in Iran and Guatemala, offered economic and
military support to military dictatorships throughout the globe, and
continued to expand the Open Door. By the end of the decade, however,
some Americans were uneasy with such hegemony, and various figures
emerged to again challenge the U.S. empire. Cultural figures such as the
beatniks condemned the conformity of Cold War life, the arms race, and
the American denial of self-determination in other lands. More
powerfully, and perhaps surprisingly, President Dwight Eisenhower, as he
was leaving office in 1961, warned against "the acquisition of
unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex. The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power still
exists." Such thoughts may have remained a novelty in the 1960s,
but U.S. intervention in Vietnam, still limited as Eisenhower left
office, would mushroom in the coming years and give rise to a mass
antiwar movement that would also question what critics saw as
America's imperial behavior overseas and the military-industrial
complex at home.

As in the 1840s and 1890s, many Americans in the 1960s opposed U.S.
intervention in a foreign war and developed a larger anti-imperialist
critique as a result of their challenge to the conflict at hand. Even
before the major decisions to commit advisers, airpower, and combat
forces, and essentially "Americanize" the Vietnam War,
there was evident concern over the growing U.S. role in the world.
Movements calling for an end to the arms race, peace with the Soviet
Union, normal relations with Cuba, and recognition of the
People's Republic of China, for instance, were in existence
during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Cold War consensus on
an aggressive foreign policy, though still noticeable, was being
questioned in some quarters. Vietnam accelerated that process, however,
and brought about the greatest domestic challenge to American
involvement abroad in the twentieth century.

By 1964, as the United States began to conduct air attacks against the
National Liberation Front in Vietnam, peace activists, professors, and
students were beginning to challenge the growing American role in
Indochina and the larger foreign policy context of the cold war.
Scholars such as the linguist Noam Chomsky, the historian William
Appleman Williams, and the political scientist Hans Morgenthau
participated in "teach-ins" on Vietnam, giving rise to a
national movement on college campuses and serving as a foundation for
the antiwar movement. The Students for a Democratic Society, the largest
radical student group of the period, held the first antiwar rally in
1964, and its adherents not only scored intervention in Vietnam but also
offered a comprehensive analysis of the leaders of the American
"empire," which, they charged, denied self-determination
to Third World nations, intervened on behalf of corporate interests, and
betrayed American principles. African Americans, engaged in an epic
struggle for civil rights, added, as had Du Bois and Robeson earlier,
that the United States had assumed the position of a white imperial
power suppressing the yearnings for freedom of nonwhite peoples, whether
in Indochina or below the Mason-Dixon Line. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights leader, went so far as to call
the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today," while the militant Black Panther Party called on African
Americans to refuse to join the military or support U.S. intervention
and openly sympathized with Third World revolutionary and
anti-imperialist movements.

Politicians entered the debate as well, as they had during the League of
Nations fight after World War I. Senators J. William Fulbright, George
McGovern, Ernest Gruening, Wayne Morse, Mark Hatfield, Frank Church, and
others were, like the progressives of the 1920s, anti-imperialist and
internationalist. Fulbright, like Borah, chaired the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations and opposed the policies of the president of his own
party. The senator from Arkansas believed that America had
"betrayed its own past and its own promise … of free men
building an example for the world. Now … it sees a nation that
seemed to represent something new and hopeful reverting to the vanity of
past empires."

Similar opinions were held by a significant number of Americans,
including religious leaders, businessmen, and even military officials.
Following in the tradition of Smedley Butler, former Marine Commandant
David Shoup blasted not only the war but also the foundations of U.S.
foreign policy. "I believe that if we had and would keep our
dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these
nations so full of depressed, exploited people," he said in 1966,
"they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design
and want. That they fight and work for. [Not one] crammed down their
throats by Americans." Shoup's views, bluntly expressed,
were shared by a significant number of Americans by the late 1960s and
1970s. Millions demonstrated publicly against the war and also called
for a new, noninterventionist foreign policy. "Dove"
senators tried to pass legislation to limit the war and, after U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, enacted the War Powers Act to restrict
the power of the president to commit U.S. forces abroad, a measure that
was principally a response to the "imperial" presidency of
Richard Nixon, who had waged war without authorization in Cambodia and
Laos and was responsible for the Watergate crisis at home. By the
mid-1970s, the United States seemed less prone to intervene in world
affairs, a condition derided as the "Vietnam syndrome" by
conservative critics but hailed as an anti-imperialist triumph by
progressive and inter-nationalist forces.

Such restraint, however, was short-lived; the Carter and Reagan
administrations began to ratchet up the Cold War, increasing military
spending, taking a more bellicose approach to the Soviet Union after the
détente of the 1970s, and asserting American imperium in Central
America and elsewhere. Millions of citizens, often invoking the legacy
of Vietnam, challenged such policies as violations of national and
international laws and of American values. Amid the Iran-contra scandal,
they pointed out the similarities between the imperial presidencies of
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Still, the 1980s and early 1990s were
not periods of great anti-imperial activity. That would change
dramatically, however, by the later 1990s as Americans had a vital role
in a global coalition that was challenging the world's economic
structure. In some measure, conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and Ross
Perot, maverick presidential candidates in 1992 and 1996, used
anti-imperial and nativist themes to sound the alarms about the new
global economy. Sounding like progressives in the 1890s or isolationists
after World War I, they believed that transnational corporations were
moving abroad to find cheaper labor, thus causing American workers to
lose jobs, and that the government and business elite was more
interested in extending its interests abroad than in taking care of its
citizens at home. Ironically, they even called for an end to U.S.
sanctions against enemy states such as Iraq and Cuba, governments for
which they held little love, because such economic warfare was damaging
the people of those lands and not helping to oust Saddam Hussein and
Fidel Castro. The United States was "a republic, not an
empire," Buchanan often reminded Americans throughout the 1990s.

By the later part of that decade—with many major powers
establishing regional and world economic groups such as the European
Union, signatories of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the
World Trade Organization— anti-imperialists went on the
offensive. Although such institutions had usually existed with little
fanfare or opposition, critics such as Chomsky, the longtime consumer
advocate Ralph Nader, and the anti-globalization activist Kevin Danaher
emerged to attack what they considered a new form of global empire, with
the United States as hegemon. From 1999 to 2001, when environmentalists,
union members, student activists, anarchists, and other forces disrupted
meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, of the World Bank
in Washington, D.C., and of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in
Quebec, the lines were drawn in this new round in the global contest
between the great powers and the forces of anti-imperialism.

As critics of American power, expansion, or empire entered the
twenty-first century, they were using many of the same arguments that
George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Mark Twain, William Borah, and J.
William Fulbright put forth in earlier periods. Broadly defined to mean
the aggressive use of power, the denial of self-determination abroad,
militarism, or actions inconsistent with a republican form of
government, American imperialism has a long tradition, but so does its
anti-imperial counterpoint. Clearly, anti-imperialists, isolationists,
doves, and others opposed to the excessive use of power or the extension
of U.S. influence have been on the defensive as American leaders have
tallied up an impressive array of territorial holdings, military
interventions, proxy governments, and economic opportunities. One can
ponder, however, how much more expansive the reach of American power or
the extent of American militarism would have been without critics at
home challenging the establishment and augmentation of
"empire" at all steps along the way.

"The price of empire," J. William Fulbright remarked
during the Vietnam War, "is America's soul, and that price
is too high." Those words could just as easily have been uttered
by John Quincy Adams at the turn of the nineteenth century. As America
goes abroad in the future, in search of markets, bases, or even monsters
to slay, one can be reasonably certain that there will be significant
forces at home questioning and protesting against such extension of U.S.
power, as there have been for more than two centuries.

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